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Newspapers are having problems, but cutting content isn't the way to go

Submitted by Chad on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 12:13pm.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Chad Rubel

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. 

-- Thomas Jefferson

The newspaper industry had a lousy 2008, and usually when you reach that point, you're thankful for the next year. But 2009 is likely to be worse than 2008.

There is the report from the Atlantic on the perilous financial state of The New York Times.

Closer to our home, the Chicago Tribune didn't run a Sunday magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times didn't have a business section on Tuesday. And the Sun-Times union members are being asked to take a 7 percent overall reduction in compensation packages. 

And let's not forget the recent Detroit newspaper decision not to have 7-day delivery, and the Christian Science Monitor going to a Web-only format.

The radio industry and the film industry suffered as a result of television, and while both industries suffered, they were able to reinvent themselves.

But the newspaper industry has a number of problems, above and beyond. Radio and movies didn't try to reinvent themselves during a worldwide depression, or during a radical adjustment over the effectiveness of advertising.

If you really look at the dynamic of the effectiveness of advertising in the media, you might be seriously appalled. For a long time in radio and television, ratings and advertisers relied on people writing down call letters and shows in a diary. Try being a rating company employee looking at a diary entry where a show and channel are listed and they contradict each other.

And think of the poor advertisers who have to rely on people's memory for what they listened to or watched during a week. Now radio and television are using more precise instruments of determining listening and watching patterns -- devices that pick up on which radio signals are being played, for example.

For newspapers, the archaic standard has been how many copies of a paper are sold. If you run a full-page ad in the sports section of a daily newspaper, it's assumed that the number of papers sold is how many people will see your ad. But not everyone reads the sports section, or looks through all the front section, or wherever the ad is located.

So newspapers have relied on classified ads and legal ads for revenue. And a lot of those classified ads are drifting to online outlets, such as Craigslist.  

But unlike radio and television, there aren't new technologies to help newspapers be more effective tools for advertisers. Newspapers who complain that they don't get revenue from online content neglect to mention that they do run banner ads and other online ads. If I ran an industry that relied on advertising, I certainly wouldn't badmouth the effectiveness of the ads I was running. But newspapers do that all the time with their online ads.

Radio and films didn't cut back on content to save their industry; they went in a different direction to bring something relevant that their medium could convey. Rock and roll did a lot to save radio, first AM and then FM.

Newspapers have responded to potential changes but cutting back or running more wire service filler, and some papers are even getting rid of the filler. They complain about the lack of space for comic strips, yet they make them so small that if you aren't reading comics online, you aren't getting the full experience.

If anything, newspapers should make comics larger, especially if their audience is getting older and has poorer eyesight. Bring something innovative and an experience unique and special to holding newsprint in your hands.

An amazing number of subscriptions depends on the right comic strips or features, ranging from Dear Abby to the column on bridge. But newspapers are cutting what gets them sales. Local coverage suffers with cutbacks, again something that newspapers can uniquely deliver.

It's difficult to look at what newspapers are doing, since for that industry, we are still in the eye of the storm. Radio made huge mistakes while it was in the eye of its storm. But newspapers have a smaller error margin than radio had in the 1950s and 1960s. And it seems that only recently have they even discovered there was a problem.

In the online world, established newspapers had credibility, something many other online outlets don't have. And some are better at adapting than others. The Washington Post does a beautiful job with its online chats. The New York Times tried charging for some of its online content, but went about it in an awkward way.

People would be willing to pay for some online content, but it would have to be in a way that made delivery as problem-free as possible. If you look at the complaints newspapers get, often they are delivery problems of the product.

Newspapers will try many different things to save itself. And some of those things will go poorly. But cutting back on content is the biggest mistake newspapers can make. People are reading newspapers less often because they have less relevance in their lives. Cutting back on content only makes the situation worse.

Newspapers have credibility (mostly) and an unique delivery system. They should start thinking about how to make a better product so people will want to buy newspapers. Radio eventually figured it out. It's newspapers' turn. Will they rise to the challenge?

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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The operative words are "news" and "paper"

Submitted by RA Bows on Fri, 01/09/2009 - 5:00pm.
Newspapers are failing first and foremost obviously because fewer people are subscribing. Fewer people are subscribing because: 1) they can get less-filtered information on the Internet; and 2) newspapers aren't green.

As long as newspapers are published in the interests of for-profit corporations, they are unlikely to publish the truth, but rather what benefits their owners, to wit:

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. The business of the Journalist is to destroy truth; To lie outright; To pervert; To vilify; To fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and or lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
--John Swinton, former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, circa 1880

and

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
--David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.

So, the first thing that corporate newspapers need to do is go broke, so that the journalists can take over (much like some musician's unions did with symphony orchestras). This is not a guarantee of more accurate news and analysis, since most journalists have been educated at universities where the medieval implementation of tenure track rewards conformity; however, its a start.

The other initiative needed to revive newspapers is the legalization and of hemp and various tax breaks for such. The prohibition of hemp (and cannibis) were pushed by DuPont and St. Regis because they had patents on the production of paper from trees. The campaign against hemp and cannibis was leveraged with racism (calling cannibis "marijuana") and absurd propaganda ("Reefer Madness").

Legalizing hemp would save massive numbers of trees and turn newspapers green. This may not do the trick either, since the Internet is quickly becoming the news source of choice, but it would remove the stigma of supporting a paper-based medium and would help newspapers maintain a minimum presence from which they could leverage their online initiatives.

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Here's the pony

Submitted by GaryPDX on Fri, 01/09/2009 - 6:37am.
That empty space that was the newsroom can come back as the largest AA meeting in town -- with just a few new faces.
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Death of Newspapers

Submitted by tuff-tuff on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 6:55pm.
The newspaper industry did this to themselves by becoming a mouthpiece for the troll-boy bush government and couching every important news story in neocon philosophy. Did any major newspaper challenge bush and his minions when he lied about weapons of mass destruction? How about the torture? How about Habeas Corpus? Are there any investigative reporters employed at any of the major newspapers? If there are, then how come they seem to have forgotten the basics of reporting; Who, what, where, when and why. I do not give one, good, flying, blasted damn what a reporter thinks about a news story. I just want to be told the facts. If a reporter wants to write a novel, fine but keep the flowery, never-ending sentences for the novel. If newspapers hired real reporters who actually reported the news instead of insinuating their point of view into every, single story, they would be selling newspapers like popcorn at the movies. What a joy it would be to get just the facts and nothing but the facts. Oh, and it would help if those people who own the newspapers ALLOWED the TRUTH to be printed.
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All bad news gives fits to print

Submitted by nero on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 6:22pm.
The problem with newspapers isn't with their content. Newspapers' problem is their outdated, inefficient business model. Here's newspapers' information pipeline: chop down forests of trees; haul to mills to process into paper; ship huge rolls of paper halfway around the world; apply tanker-loads of ink using huge presses; collate, sort, bundle and load on trucks; distribute to carriers who drive around to deliver an individual newspaper to each home -- where the paper is thrown away and the process begins anew each day. Yikes. Is there be a more resource-chewing, labor intensive, energy-wasting method of disseminating information on the planet? It's time to let newsprint go the way of cuneiform tablets. The death of the daily newspaper needn't send readers into mourning. Good journalism needs to follow new, efficient avenues of dispensing the news. Any new method will not involve paper, ink, presses or gasoline. News is most efficiently and effectively delivered online. Early models range from the Christian Science Monitor to the Huffington Post to The New Haven Independent. We won't have to give up investigative journalism. We won't have to concede local coverage. We won't have to settle for single-source international coverage. We'll use the inherent efficiencies of the Internet to nurture a vigorous press for the 21st century. Journalists and newspaper executives (kicking and screaming) will find the way. Just watch it happen.
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Start telling the truth?

Submitted by smchris on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 4:02pm.
Twenty+ years ago a "troublemaker" in our metro started a neo-yippie movement of spray painting "lies" on newspaper boxes. Well, he was just the one telling the truth. Can we talk? Sure, the internet cuts into newspapers. Works for me -- particularly in a country Reporters Without Borders has ranked in the mid-30s to mid-50s among countries in recent years in freedom of the press. But we still don't have e-paper and there is still no substitute for news pulp for affordable portability. So, when we cut to the bottom line, the internet is an excuse for the newspapers' lack of creating a viable product. They still have the medium, they still have a price advantage for what they offer. What they don't have is content value.
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I only read newspapers out of nostalgia now

Submitted by yurbud on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 1:57pm.
I picked up the paper if I plan to eat at my local diner, but I don't expect to see any news or provocative ideas. Even the opinion page is often bereft of opinion apart from the far right and the toothless center left.

You would think a business whose product has "news" in its name would be out digging up dirt, finding out what both parties are avoiding talking about, or investigating the backstory behind the days events. They do not. They regurgitate press releases and try to avoid offending major advertisers.

If I want news, I have to come someplace like Buzzflash, that scours the internet for the bits and pieces of actual news that papers put on their website, or some thankless blogger dug up, or what the BBC or even Asia Times said with more detail and insight about events here than our own media would dare.

What a pathetic sign of our decline as a world power: our press is free but crippled with syphilitic dementia from getting in bed with the big business a few times too many.

Professorsmartass.com
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